becoming familiar with the types of alerts coming through and
learning how to respond to them. “Because some alerts only
show up every few months, it might be a year before he realizes
[a certain] alert is something he needs to fix,” Miller says.

Setting the Stage

Meanwhile, Weddle says not all employees are up to the task oflearning open-source skills. “It’s heavily personality-dependent,”he says. “If you have someone antagonistic to the open-sourceidea, they’ll be hard to train. But if they’re open-minded or dabbledin both open-source and commercial technologies, it’s quite easy.”A case in point was when his company first moved to opensource. On his three-person staff, one employee blossomedduring the migration, while another was less enthusiastic. “Hebegan to pick up on it, but another opportunity came up andhe jumped ship,” Weddle says. “There are these odd religiouswars. If someone is entrenched, they’re just not going to change.But most folks are in the middle, and it’s not that big a deal toget someone to switch. Many revel in it — they’ve never had achance to play with this before, and they go for it.”David O’Berry, director of I T systems and services at theSouth Carolina Department of Probation, Parole and PardonServices, agrees that it’s the team itself that dictates the ease ofthe transition. “A strong development staff can absorb anything,”he says. In his experience, training on open source is no differentfrom training on any unfamiliar technology. “Six years ago, Iwent from PowerBuilder to .Net, and that was no easier than if Iwere going to J2EE,” he says. “No matter what, when you movefrom one technology to another, there’s going to be retraining.”Preparing a staff for open source can take time. At TheMitre Corp., CIO Joel Jacobs says the public-interest not-for-profit’s success with open source is very much tied into its in-vestment in development skills over the past five years and itsemphasis on continual innovation. Mitre’s main open-sourceinitiative is its Linux-based intranet portal, developed over thepast 18 months and now used by more than 7,000 employees.

For the past few years, Bedford, Mass.-based Mitre has been
working to make sure it has the right skills in-house to do
more custom development so it doesn’t have to rely on commercial systems. “For some people, that was an easy transformation, while for others, it wasn’t the right environment, “and
they have moved on to more suitable opportunities,” says Bill
Donaldson, head of applications development.

It’s not always easy to find the right staffers, say Donaldson
and Jacobs. “We’re seeing difficulty hiring across the board,” for
both custom code and open source, Jacobs says. However, the fact
that Mitre offers opportunities to work with open source makes
it more attractive to job hunters, he believes. Additionally, Mitre’s
efforts to create an engaged workforce that is working on things
that matter to them makes it easier to recruit and train internally.

In the end, open-source proponents say the need for training
shouldn’t discourage companies from migrating to or expanding
their use of open source. “Although we pay more for the troops,
the lower costs and the lack of hassle when I want to change
something makes all the difference,” Weddle says. “When new
business requirements come barreling down, it’s so much easier
to respond with the open-source stack.” u

Brandel is a Computerworld contributing writer. You can
contact her at marybrandel@verizon.net.